Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  Not surprisingly, Park didn’t stop to look around, and it was another twenty years before a fellow Scot, Alexander Gordon Laing, approaching from the desert to the north, became the first European to reach Timbuktu for nearly 300 years.

  Neither survived to tell their tales.

  Timbuktu remains well off any beaten track. There is an airstrip from which tourists are flown in and out, but it remains a city at the end of the road, centre of an administrative region but not much else. Yet its appeal remains almost as potent as it was for Laing and those who risked their lives to follow him. To the almost certain puzzlement of the locals, Westerners remain drawn to Timbuktu like moths to a candle. No other city remains as synonymous with the fabulous, the lonely and the remote. Timbuktu, la mysterieuse, they call it in the tourist brochures - a Holy Grail for the adventurous traveller.

  It’s hard to remain unexcited as we glide slowly into the little inlet at Kabara, the port for Timbuktu itself.

  Our arrival coincides with one of the very finest African sunsets, perhaps the best I’ve witnessed on this journey. In a huge sky, day and night are for a moment perfectly balanced. The sun going down on one side, as a full moon rises on the other. Colours change slowly and majestically. Light blue becomes pink-tinged grey and minutes later, as we grate against the gravel bank, half the sky is lemon and the other half is violet.

  A hippo burps in the distance and above us a stream of bats swerves out across the sky. This is why I leave home. Moonlight bathes the groves of trees beside the good metalled road that runs the 14 miles from Kabara into Timbuktu. At the city limits the tarmac gives out and leaves us to the sand. I crane my head around to see if I can see anything fabulous, but all I see is a roundabout with a lumpy concrete monument and battered sign welcoming us to ‘Timbuktu, City of Three Hundred and Thirty-Three Saints’.

  First impressions - interiors lit by bare bulbs, donkeys swaying down the street with bales of hay ballooning around them, tall figures in indigo robes caught in the glare of our headlights.

  Our hotel, the Relais Azalai, is on a low rise on the western edge of town, overlooking what until recently was a river. We unload and carry our bags in through a now familiar line of salesmen, only this time they are Touareg, lean, olive-skinned faces swathed in black and indigo headdresses. And they’re not just outside the hotel; the staff at reception are also swathed in black or blue headdresses. This is the first sign that Timbuktu is not like other places. Up to now, nomads have always been on the fringes of urban life. In Timbuktu they run the place.

  Enjoy a few luxuries - a shower, cold beers, a hot meal and a bed. My air-conditioning sounds like an overladen truck on a very steep hill. But what the hell, I’m in Timbuktu.

  Day Fifty-Two

  TIMBUKTU

  Walk out of the hotel to look around, but it’s quite impossible. The only reason a foreigner would walk out of his hotel unescorted is clearly to buy something, and the Touareg know nothing of the soft sell.

  By the time I’m driven back in by the rattling of silver rings and the cries of ‘I give you good price’, I have time to take in a pretty depressing landscape. The walls of Timbuktu look fine, but in front of them is another Timbuktu, a city of semicircular huts set in thorn bush stockades and covered in sheeting of rattan or plastic. Its trees and bushes are hung with plastic bags and children and animals share the sand.

  It seems the Touareg, who founded Timbuktu 900 years ago, are still coming in from the desert.

  My spirits rise when we’re driven into town. A city that seems almost determined to be decrepit still has some beautiful buildings. One of the finest is the catchily named Djingareiber Mosque. It’s also one of the very few buildings that would have been here in the golden age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Leo Africanus described Timbuktu as a city where the king ‘kept a magnificent and well-furnished court’, with ‘a great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king’s expense’. Irregular walls run round the mosque, curved and crenellated with rounded Sudanese outlines and supported with well-cut buttresses. The banco plaster that covers the walls is so recent that it’s patterned with the handprints of those who applied it.

  We are allowed inside. At the main door two boys offer their help.

  ‘We will guard your shoes,’ they promise solemnly, laying my travel-stained sneakers one beside the other with great tenderness, as if they were new-born children.

  What strikes me immediately is how cool it is inside the walls, and how dark. Narrow arcades run through a forest of rough-plastered columns, 130 of them, receding into the gloom.

  It has an ancient, unostentatious feel to it, enclosed and protective, intimate and impressive at the same time. There is little decoration. Long timber beams, said to be cut from Dom palms 60 miles away from the city, support the ceiling. The walls and columns are a mixture of local limestone, mud bricks and plaster. The extra strength of the stonework probably accounts for why this mosque has proved more durable than its counterpart in Djenne. It has stood here since 1327, when it was built by a man called El Saheli, credited as the inventor of the process by which mud bricks are made to this day.

  I stroll amongst the columns, savouring the silence. Every now and then a shaft of sunlight breaks through, piercing the darkness like a silver blade, or a door opens, briefly silhouetting a figure against a shining wall of heat.

  The imam of the Djingareiber Mosque is coolness itself. He arrives for Friday prayers decked out in a swirl of airy, white, cotton robes and a matching turban. A neatly trimmed white beard contrasts sharply with the deep ebony of his skin. After prayers he invites us to his house nearby. It’s odd to walk in off the street and find yourself in a house carpeted with sand, albeit of much finer quality than the public sand outside. Also odd that in such a substantial property the interior doors should be faced with corrugated tin.

  We sit in the sand and take tea together, whilst in clear and careful French he explains the history of Timbuktu. He’s at great pains to emphasise the intellectual and scholarly achievements of the Middle Ages and the sharp and sudden decline that followed the Moroccan invasion at the end of the sixteenth century. Scholars were deported and killed he says, with grave concern, as if it had happened yesterday.

  Talking to this wise and educated man, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Timbuktu has been in steady decline since the time of William Shakespeare.

  Even when Europeans finally braved the hostility of the desert to reach it, there was a definite hint of anticlimax. Rene Caillie, who came here in 1828, found ‘this capital of the Soudan, which had for so long been the goal of all my ambitions’ to be little more than ‘a jumble of badly built houses, ruled over by a heavy silence’. On the other hand, Alexander Laing, the Scot who beat him to it by two years, wrote that ‘in every respect except in size … it has completely met my expectations’.

  Laing’s achievement in reaching Timbuktu at all becomes the more admirable, or insanely foolhardy, when you consider that in the 250 years following the Moroccan invasion, forty-three Europeans set out to reach the city and only four succeeded, of which he was the first. He crossed the Sahara from Tripoli in Libya, a 2000-mile journey during which he was brutally attacked and severely wounded by tribesmen on the way and murdered by them, for refusing to renounce his Christianity, on the way back. He was thirty-three.

  During his five-week stay in the city, though, Laing was well looked after by the trading community and the house in which he stayed still stands.

  On the wall above the door is a plaque to his memory, whilst in front of the house, stuck in the sand, a less discreet signboard announces in loud stencil that this is ‘Mission Culturelle, Site No. 2. Gordon Laing’.

  By the standard of the time, this slim two-storey corner house must have been quite substantial. Inside, the rooms are clean and empty. I’m told it’s up for rent and consider putting down a deposit for the address alone. />
  An 8- by 5-foot downstairs room with yellow washed walls leads, via a flight of narrow stairs, up to another low room with delicately carved arabesque shutters, and from there onto a flat roof.

  I stand out here for as long as I can bear the scorching midday heat, taking in the view.

  Stretched out beneath me is a pale, dusty city with the colour bleached out of it. There are few modern buildings, and, apart from the pyramid-shaped minarets of the mosques, the overall feel is of flat roofs and iron-grilled windows, broken up by the occasional colonial touch: a stone arch, an attempted balustrade. There are satellite dishes on the walls but open sewers down the centre of the streets. Many buildings are either crumbling or derelict and the tents, families and livestock of the nomads have taken over the corpses of abandoned houses.

  I shade my eyes and stare out beyond the walls to the desert, which has the city in an ever-tightening grip. Due north, the direction that both Laing and Caillie took when they left Timbuktu, there is no accommodation for the traveller before the town of Taoudenni, more than 400 miles into the desert. And you would not be welcome there. Taoudenni is a Saharan Siberia, an unimaginably hostile place, where Mali sends her criminals and troublemakers to work the salt mines, out of the sight of foreigners.

  Back down amongst its narrow streets, Timbuktu feels tired, as if the effort of just being here at all is using up all her energies. There is none of the brash bounce of Mopti or the fragile charm of Djenne. The shops have little to sell, and though the Mission Culturelle does its best to direct you to interesting places, it does so without much conviction.

  The best time to wander comes later, when the great disabling heat of the day is over. Then I happily potter in a warren of back streets, stepping over an open latrine to look more closely at a plaque announcing the house of one of the greatest Saharan explorers of all. ‘Heinrich Barth 1853-1854’. Barth travelled thousands of miles across the desert and did live to tell the tale, becoming professor of geography at Berlin University. I buy bread straight out of one of the cone-like ovens that dot the city. The bread is good - light, and with just a hint of that familiar gritty texture which tells you, as if you didn’t know by now, that you are back in the Sahara.

  The local people are not the extroverts of Dakar or Bamako, but though they’re wary of us, they’re curious at the same time. I fall to wondering if I’ve been too hard on the city. Maybe, after eight weeks on the road, it’s me that’s knackered, not Timbuktu.

  Day Fifty-Three

  TIMBUKTU

  Up at seven. In the courtyard of the Relais Azalai a little bird, crown and breast dusted red, skitters amongst the lacework of bougainvillea bushes, tired and dry in the already intense heat. A boy is watering the mottled garden, valiantly but hopelessly, with a thin, trickling hose.

  Reception is quiet. The beady-eyed salesmen who patrolled it last night, robes full of unmissable bargains, are gone. A solitary figure in crumpled blue and white robe lies curled up on one of the chairs, eyes shut, breathing deeply. Suddenly, without warning, his hands shoot out and with a resounding crack he clamps them either side of a mosquito. He examines his victim briefly and settles back to sleep.

  It turns out that this is Mohammed, a camel owner who is taking us out into the desert to meet a caravan returning from the north and to help us find one with whom we can travel on from here.

  He pulls himself wearily off the chair and greets us all with a handshake, though he says nothing.

  It’s only later, when I hear him talking with a friend, that I realise his voice has almost gone. The words squeeze out in a husky croak, and I wonder if this is a price he’s paying for a life lived in the scouring sands of the Sahara.

  A few miles out of town, past the nomad encampments, where the sand is dark with sheep and goat droppings, I climb to the top of a dune for my first sight of a camel train. A long, elegant procession breaks the perfect symmetry of blue sky and brown sand as it picks its way towards us. There are thirty or forty animals, all single-humped Arabian camels, properly called dromedaries, roped together in single file. I try to imagine what a sight it would have been in the heyday of trans-Saharan caravans, when 20,000 camels crossed the desert at a time. Today’s modest column is led by a wiry Touareg with his black headdress unwound and draped around his neck. A sprawling herd of goats crosses their path. Industrious dung beetles scuttle about in the sand beneath my feet. A man in a vivid yellow robe appears on the crest of a nearby dune, accompanied by a young boy. He watches us watching him, and yawns. This must be the nearest the Sahara gets to a rush hour.

  The camels draw closer, moving with a careful gait, noses upturned, as if finding the whole thing intensely distasteful. On every one of their backs are slung two glittering silver-grey slabs of salt. I half expect to find commandments written on their sides. In fact, the only inscription on the tablets is the name of the owner, marked in red dye.

  Mohammed greets the leader of the caravan, and whilst they talk the camels fold themselves gratefully down onto the sand, like collapsible tables, front legs first, back legs folded in neatly beneath their behinds. In motion and in repose these are graceful animals; it’s just the bit in between that’s a mess.

  The blocks of salt they carry each weigh around 50 kilograms, over 100 pounds, so those camels with four on their backs would have been hauling almost a quarter of a ton of salt across the desert, fourteen hours a day, for the past three weeks. No wonder they are so happily sighing, gurgling, chomping and farting their appreciation at having arrived in Timbuktu. I wonder if they instinctively knew that the end was in sight, could perhaps sniff the waters of the Niger, onto which their burdens would soon be transferred and shipped downstream to the markets of sub-Saharan Africa.

  The bad news is that, after talking to the leader of the caravan, Mohammed establishes that, with high summer and infernal temperatures just beginning, no more salt caravans will be entering or leaving Timbuktu for several months. If we really want to travel with a camel train, we will do better to head east, where there is still a regular salt run across the Tenere Desert between Agadez and Bilma. I have read about the Tenere. Set almost at the centre of the Sahara, it has a reputation for stark beauty and fierce heat.

  Back at the hotel, my resolve falters. No-one, I’m firmly assured, will be in the heart of the desert in high summer. The nomads move south and will not return until after the rains, which will render much of the route impassable until they end in August and September.

  So we decide to follow the ancient desert ritual of migration and return home. We shall use an English summer to cool off until the Saharan summer has burnt itself out.

  NIGER

  Day Fifty-Four

  NEAR INGAL

  There are, at a rough estimate, one and three-quarter million nomads in the Sahara, of whom about a million are Arab and half a million are descended from pre-Arab inhabitants, like the Berbers of Algeria and Morocco and the Touareg, Toubou and Fulani of the central and southern Sahara. Every year a substantial number of these transient populations converge on the town of Ingal, 70 miles west of Agadez, in the Republic of Niger, for a grand get-together called Cure Salee. It means, literally, ‘salt cure’, a celebration of the fattening of the cattle after the summer migration.

  It’s the beginning of September when we return to the Sahara and though the sun is still powerful, something is different. The desert air is humid. The hard brown earth is covered in a thin fuzz of green grass. The rains have come and transformed a desert that is always ready to blossom. Where there was only sand a few weeks ago there are now small ponds and trees waist high in standing water. And the Sahara is no longer a bug-free zone. At dawn and dusk the mosquitoes are out, malarial and dangerous.

  The bush is busy with people, moving, like us, towards Ingal; but unlike us they are walking and have walked several hundred miles with their families and their animals to the summer grazing in the south and back again. We fall in with a group of Wodaabe, a pastoral and
nomadic branch of the Fulani people, who are found right across the southern Sahara from Senegal to Chad.

  They carry their goods on donkeys or on their backs. Most of them are barefoot or wearing flip-flop sandals. Their legs and feet must be immune to the sharp burrs that lurk in the tussocky grass, attaching themselves to skin and clothing, stabbing and pricking and defying all but the most delicate attempts to remove them.

  Mothers carry the smallest children on their backs, but any child above the age of six or seven is at work, leading a donkey, carrying a lamb or keeping an eye on the sheep and goats. The older boys and the men are preoccupied with the cattle, the wealth of these families and virtually their only tradeable asset. Survival of the cattle is the reason they have made this long march and, now, when their beasts are fattening and their assets are so close to being realised, their protection has never been as important.

  There are anxious faces. The group is heading towards a creek, where there is water and a place to spend the night, but as soon as the cattle smell the water they stampede forward and have to be restrained with shouts and sticks.

  The donkeys have little option but to trudge doggedly through the bush, weighed down as they are with baskets, blankets, bedrolls, braziers, babies, cooking pots and goatskin water bags.

  Standing out from the tall, dark Africans is a short, ruddy European. Her name is Celine, and she’s from Montauban in southwest France. For the last few weeks she’s been travelling with the Wodaabe. Doulla Makao, her friend, is one of the leaders of this group. He’s tall and slim and looks inconsolably sad, though I sense that much of this is down to sheer physical exhaustion. His manner is gentle and unhurried. He speaks English and French and has travelled to Europe. He seems an unlikely figure to be tramping across the bush, but when I suggest this he doesn’t seem to understand what I mean. These are his people, where else would he be?